Recently many people started noticing a new traffic source in the referral section of their stats software, coming from hosts like semalt.semalt.com, 69.semal.com, 23.semalt.com. Someone might wonder what’s the problem since more traffic is coming their way but in reality those hosts are just web crawling bots that have nothing to do with real visitors and that’s where the problem is – Google Analytics treats them as real visitors and this increases the bounce rate which makes your stats invalid. Up until recently the only way to solve the problem was to add a filter in Google Analytics but after many complaints the people from semalt have decided to give us a tool with which we can remove our sites from their crawlers.

You can add all the sites you want to exclude from their system from http://semalt.com/project_crawler.php one at a line. It’s important to mention that they treat each subdomain as a different site so for example if you own the domain levelx.org and have set up a subdomain www for it, you will have to enter in the input field http://levelx.org and http://www.levelx.org on separate lines.